Are women better multi-taskers than men?

Are women better at multi-tasking than men? And does being a parent improve your ability to do more than two things at once?

By Genelle Weule

Planning and strategy may make women appear to be better mult-taskers. (Source: iStockphoto)

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Are women better at multi-tasking than men? And does being a parent improve your ability to do more than two things at once?

It's a common belief that women are better at multi-tasking than men. After all, productivity studies show that women continue to do the lion's share of household and childcare tasks, while also holding down part- or full-time work.

So this must mean women are better multi-taskers, right? Not necessarily.

For a topic that causes so much heat in the kitchen, there's surprisingly little scientific evidence to declare a clear winner.

"If we exclude innate tasks such as walking or over-learned sensory-motor tasks such as drumming, humans cannot perform two tasks at once: one task is always put on hold, while the other is performed and vice versa," says Koechlin.

Last year Koechlin's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the brain activity of 32 people, 16 men and 16 women, while they performed two simple letter matching tests.

Their research, published in Science, suggests that both hemispheres of the brain's medial frontal cortex acts like a tag-team, switching between tasks.

They uncovered no difference between men and women. Despite this finding, however, Koechlin believes the belief that women may be better at multi-tasking "has some real roots."

"A possible hypothesis is that women tend to equate priorities, while men tend to more hierarchise priorities when facing multiple tasks," he says.

Women win by planning

Planning and strategy is the key to women's success, says Professor Keith Laws from the UK's University of Hertfordshire, who believes women are better at multi-tasking.

Last year, Laws studied a group of 50 men and 50 women as part of a series of unpublished research.

The participants were challenged to complete a range of 'real life' tasks - find restaurants on a map, solve simple arithmetic and draw a plan to find a lost key while they were simultaneously interrupted by telephone calls.

The men and women performed equally well on the maths and map reading tasks - tasks normally deemed to be male strengths — and answering the phone. But 70 per cent of the women outshone the men in the 'lost key' task.

"The women have a much better planning and strategy for finding the key. The men tend to jump to into it and be far less organised and thorough. It's as if they don't stop to reflect and plan for a moment."

But while the ability to develop strategies for coping with the multiple tasks in the everyday life could give women an edge, "nobody can juggle two, never mind three, 'complex' tasks at the same time," he says.

Likewise, the notion that women tend to do lots of tasks badly while men are better at uni-tasking — concentrating and performing one task really well — is a myth, adds Laws.

As part of a bigger research project Laws also plans to see whether training can improve multi-tasking, whether certain professions are better than others, and how accurate people are at rating their multi-tasking abilities.

Results so far show that "people are not very accurate at self-rating their multi-tasking abilities", he says.

Productivity in the home

Whether we underrate or overrate our ability to multi-task, we certainly believe we are doing more of it in the home.

Dr Gigi Foster from the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales is studying the impact of multi-tasking on productivity in the home, particularly childcare.

An analysis of Australian time use data by Foster and colleague Charlene Kalenkoski from Ohio University shows a steep rise in multi-tasked childcare reported by both genders and a decline in sole-tasked care in the ten years between 1997 and 2006. But interestingly, the more a mum reports feeling rushed and juggling multiple tasks, the better their children perform in surveys assessing child development outcomes.

"Mothers who feel they are better at multi-tasking their children score better on these outcomes and for fathers that is certainly not the case," says Foster.

To get more solid data about the relationship between multi-tasking and household productivity the researchers designed a pilot study to mimic a real-life situation.

They asked 14 undergraduates, seven men and seven women to perform a computer simulation where they had to keep a baby placated while sorting a never-ending basket of laundry.

While the study was too small to see any differences between gender, one thing was clear.

"We certainly found that people were less productive multi-tasking than sole-tasking," she says.

Further studies are planned to begin later this year that will not only test productivity sacrifices but also whether people's perceptions match reality, and whether experience makes any difference.

"We know virtually zip about how people are allocating time in the home, and how they are influencing [child] outcomes, and I just think it's really important."

Comments (3)

Comments for this story are now closed. If you would like to have your say on this story, please email ABC Science

Urien Rakarth :

12 Aug 2011 9:45:54am

I have never understood why people try to maintain the multi-tasking myth. What about male paramedics, police officers, astronauts, even male taxi drivers, all doing multiple tasks at once? Not one sex is better than the other, yet some misandrists will utilise this myth to further their own agenda.

jeltz ®:

16 Aug 2011 4:08:32pm

I now look at multitasking in a different way. I do not believe it is a good thing at all for males or females. What is needed is a combination of supervisory thinking where tasks are broken up into manageable short actions and arranged efficiently in time, combined with action completion where complete focus is given to the task in hand. You may think talking on your cell while driving is efficient multitasking...until you do not get to the meeting you were discussing on the cell.

Watkins :

21 Sep 2011 7:26:42pm

While doing the "Multitasking" test provided on this site it quickly became clear to me that what I was good at was focusing on a current activity - that I was not multitasking at all. Yet a casual observer would probably report that in life I am a consummate multitasker.

The observation in this article that the women showed good planning in approaching a problem is probably more to the point.

I was grateful to learn that it is my ability to focus that actually helps me through the day. The concept that 'Multi-tasking' is a laudable aim can be dumped as far as I am concerned.Interesting study.

P.S. I completed this text by having to refocus every few seconds in response to family members knocking on the door, asking me questions and wanting to discuss their day.